 Hi there, it's Sandy and I'm going to be talking today a bit about thinking through color choices. And I changed my mind a lot along the way, so be prepared for that. I'm going to use a stamp set from Gertis Steiner called Melon Friends, two little critters holding their watermelon, very ready for summer kind of card. And started with the bear. I love to make black bears. So I started with some warm gray, added some black for the shadow color, but I wanted to leave some of the bounce light. So you can see I'm not hitting the edge of each of the sides of the bear so that there's a little bit of a slightly brighter color around the outside edge. It was not enough so I will have to go back and fix some things later on because this did not have enough contrast with the background by the time I got it done. Had I thought about that I might have made this a brown bear instead of a black bear, but I did end up doing some things to make it work. So I put in the left hand side, which is the shadow side, I put a little bit more of the W6 and I left more of that one layer of W6 on the right hand side. So you can see there's a little lighter highlight around the edge on the right hand side than there is on the left. I was trying to create a little highlight there so that if I got into the problem that I will get into later that I would have a little more opportunity to fix it. So next up was adding the belly and I darkened the belly since it's behind the watermelon and then put some shadows on the face. Again leaving a little bit of bounce light you can see it more clearly here. When you're all working in dark colors it's hard to see that kind of thing but I'll do the same thing on the dragon. Gonna use a YG for the base of the dragon and then jump to G's. A G28 is a cooler color than a YG03. It's more bluish so it's gonna give my greens a different flavor. If you use all yellow greens it's gonna have a different flavor of color and yes you can use them together. It's perfectly okay to mix and match them. Not a problem. So I decided to add a belly texture for the dragon and I don't know if it's a dragon or if it's an alligator. Maybe it's an alligator. Crocodile. But whatever it is he's good buddies with the bear so it's okay. Whatever kind of animal he is and here I'm adding my second color my mid-tone color in a G24. Again another cooler green but lighter than the first of the green colors and so then I'm just gonna have to build a transition into the yellow green because the yellow green is much yellower much much more of a warm color than the greens which are a little more on the blue side. Some of that will just be coloring over top of it and some of that will be showing up as really great highlights. So next I'll switch back to my YG and just putting some strokes right over top of the color that was already there and you can see there's a nice transition but the shadow color has more bluish in it and generally shadows are on the cooler side than the side that's in the sunshine. So a lot of times it's helpful to use something cooler that way. I started with this pink color for my watermelons and quickly realized that was just too much that was too light I wanted something darker so I went in with a darker color and then I cut masks because I wanted to stamp the line of water melons in behind them so I stamped it over top using some no lining because I want these to recede into the background. This is going to be a very busy card if I don't do that and I didn't want it to get so busy that you couldn't see what the two feature animals were doing eating watermelon. The color that I used for the watermelon in the background is the lighter of the two pinks because that's further in the distance. I was hoping that would separate them from the characters holding the watermelon in the front and use some greens to make the outline around each one of the watermelons. Note that watermelons have a white strip kind of in between the green and the pink that's what makes them look very watermelon-y and then I put a table in the background using a t-square to make them line straight but boy did I mess up on those X's part of my my table I really wasn't thinking very clearly about where the legs should go and that table would fall over in heartbeat but it's a card and I decided I was going to just proceed. Lots of people get all panicky if they screw something up like that you know if you minimize those kind of mistakes then you can just blow right past them and that's what I decided to do. So I'm adding these green colors in the back I started with a green at the bottom moved into yellow greens again I went from cool in the dark shadows to lighter and more yellowy in the top layer and then I colored my sky in before finishing off the trees because I wanted to be able to keep the edges of the trees sharp and crisp and if I colored that blue green right over top of them I would totally end up with all kinds of bleeding all over the place and I would also if you try to color around trees after already finishing them you're gonna end up with weird white spots and stuff so it's just easier to color the blue first and then add the trees on top. I'm gonna link you to a video that I did on drawing trees with fountain pens this is the same process as in that so I won't re-explain it here but basically you want to make your trees not look like their tree farm trees like their different sizes and different amounts of different colors so here I'm I'm using again a YG99 with a YG97 in order to create these trees and leaving some of that background color to come through while I put darker colors in some areas so it looks like a nice thick forest then I'm faced with what I'm going to do in the foreground and I started with the YG03 the same color that I used in the dragon and realized I didn't want the grass to be the same color as the dragon so now I've got to change something up and I went for a YG07 to use for the mid-tone color because I wanted to change the flavor of that so I'd have a different feeling in my green and it's a little bit more on the the yellow green side than it is on the green green side because of that but I also went in and added some greens some G24 that same color that I used on the dragon and it's going to have some unity for the whole piece to have a little bit of desaturated color down there and went over it again with the YG03 to just start to pull some of that into the more bright colors so here's where I tried to just start to fix my picnic table that was so bad I just started going over it and coloring it darker and knocking it back I left a little highlight on the tops of the both the seats and the table and just pushed it to the background some now I was going to darken the the stuff that's on the table I didn't like how bright they were they were fighting for attention and first I pulled out a blue violet color and it was a little too dark so I switched to a lighter blue violet color you could also do the same thing with a light gray and then I added the seeds back in using a gray color and then brightened up with a little bit more of the pink so that they wouldn't feel so grayish but it knocked those back so that the ones in the front start to look more vibrant but here's where I started fixing my bear because my bear sort of disappeared into the background and now I went into him again now that I could see the difference in the background behind him I could see where the spots were that were troublesome and start to create some extra layers of color that would darken it up and then use an actual black pen to draw the eyes back in and then give him little highlights so that those eyes show up in the midst of that field of dark color adding in a few more details here at the end some white pen and black well great dark gray pen for the seeds and then I decided to even get rid of the line there's there's two lines at the bottom of each of the pieces of watermelon they're holding and if you go over that line with a white pen then it brightens up that whole area where they're holding onto the watermelon does not just suddenly make those pop forward on the card and then everything in the background recedes to the back and looks softer so that is my kind of running commentary of what I was thinking as I was working on this card I hope it was helpful to you and if you have not yet subscribed please be sure to do that click the bell and the all setting and you will get all of my videos notified to you so you never miss a thing I will see you again very soon take care and have a wonderful day go create something amazing okay bye bye